Oak Park praised, but can’t win ’em all

Movoto Real Estate blog named Oak Park as the number three best city in the country for education, based on its student-teacher ratio, high school graduation rate, money spent on each student per year and test scores. The graduation rate there is 94 percent, much higher than the national average of 80 percent, and Movoto said that schools in the city spend $8,229 on each student every year. Hoffman Estates was number seven, with 16 students for every teacher. (The number one small city for education on the list was Chapel Hill, NC. Lakeville, Minn. came in at number 10.) Wheaton, Orland Park, Tinley Park and Mount Prospect also made appearances further down the list.

However:

Unfortunately, small Illinois cities can’t always be the best at everything: Even after naming Oak Park as a great small city for education, Movoto also named it as the seventh snobbiest small city in the country, based on rankings such as the percentage of residents with college degrees, private schools, performing arts per capita and art galleries per capita. The light-hearted list explained that the fact that 60 percent of the city has a college degree and their large amount of art galleries, plus some of its fancier restaurants, helped Oak Park earn its place on the list. Palo Alto, Calif. was ranked as the number one snobbiest small city in the country, while Laguna Niguel was number 10.